‘Konami Code’ creator Kazuhisa Hashimoto has died
2Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/26/konami-code-creator-kazuhisa-hashimoto-has-died/
'Konami Code' creator Kazuhisa Hashimoto has died
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, then start. Sound familiar? The Konami Code, as this sequence came to be known, is one of the most recognizable artifacts of an earlier era of gaming. Kazuhisa Hashimoto, its creator, has used up the last of his 30 lives.
Hashimoto was a programmer at Konami, and created the code during the development of one of Konami's best-known games of the 8-bit era: Gradius. Anyone who played it will remember the crushing difficulty of this iconic side-scrolling shooter.
Even the the developers, it turns out, found it a bit of a hassle to get through repeatedly for testing purposes. That's why during the porting process from arcade to NES, Hashimoto made himself a bit of a shortcut to make things a bit easier for himself.
He created a special command that would award the player the most crucial items for surviving the game's challenges. The sequence to activate it needed to be easy for him to remember during his many playthroughs, but extremely unlikely for a player to input by accident. And so he settled on the well known "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A" - after which is usually appended "start," since the code is often entered while paused or at the title screen.
Fate intervened here and the code, which was meant to be removed before the team wrapped up, was forgotten about and ended up in the shipping product. Somehow word got out about the code (who knows how such things transpired in the '80s - probably it was published in Nintendo Power) and, given the extreme difficulty of the game, its necessity led to the code being adopted by pretty much everyone who bought Gradius.
And so millions of kids who grew up in the '80s and